Introduction

A great feature of RStudio is that you can create data-driven documents. That is, documents that use combine text and analysis into a “reproducible” documents. This is done using R Markdown. In other words, it allows you to write all of the text, syntax for the analysis, etc. and keep it in a document. This way you are not bouncing between programs and everything is reproducible. This is ideal if you are using a publicly available data set.


Getting Started

First, you need to install the rmarkdown package using:

install.packages( "rmarkdown" )


Now, let’s take a look at how it works. Open a new R Markdown file using the drop-down menu as shown below:



Then, use the options to pick the type of file you want to create.


Afterwards, click on the knit function in the .Rmd pane:



You did it!


Next Steps

Easy enough right? Great! That was a simple example, there is a lot more you can do. If you are ready to charge forward, then here are some helpful links:


Some Examples

Take a look at the RWorkshop github page. Click on the topics folder.

You will see a .Rmd file for all of the sections we covered today. Let’s look through a few.


Here is another example. Take a look through the R2PhX pages. In particular, take a look at this page examining crime in Phoenix. This page is a .html file that is created using an RMarkdown file. That file can be found here.


Questions?



Please report any needed corrections to the Issues page. Thanks!



Last updated 11 October, 2023